Category: DIY

Hello again everyone! I apologize for the lack of updates. School, as it often does, got in the way once again and I haven’t made real progress on any of my own projects in just under a month now.

Luckily that all changed recently. With nothing better to do on a Saturday night, I set forth a goal of completing the new revision of the redesigned G4HUP panadapter (what I’m now calling the W3AXL Panatap) and getting it installed in my FT-450D. This proved to be both easier and more difficult than I thought. Details inside!

I recently acquired a shiny new Yaesu FT-450D. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to use one of my many RTL-SDR dongles to set up a pandapter. As luck would have it, all the hard work was done for me by Dave Powis, G4HUP. He had designed a compact, high-impedance IF tap for direct connection to any SDR. Unfortunately, with the passing of Dave came the end to all shipments of the PAT board, leaving me high and dry in the search for a cheap way to add a panadapter.

There comes a time in some hams’ lives when they’re faced with a dilemma. They can’t drill their car, the mag mounts are getting old very fast, and trunk lip mounts just won’t cut it. The misguided of the lot go towards glass-mount or fender-mount antennas, and settle for poor performance and high losses. The more adventurous, well, we get creative. So if you’re like me and you want to mount a whole bunch of antennas to your car but don’t want to drill the roof, this is the story you want to read.